Category Archives: Readings

In the course of reading an article full of things I didn’t agree with–such as the assertion that “legal scholars have generally overlooked robotics,” with our Robot Law book cited as an honorable exception when it is instead the leading edge of a trend–I came upon an arresting sentence:

[T]he law is characterised by an increasingly central role played by facts, in the sense that there is ‘an extreme virulence of facts, which have the vigour to affect the law and shape it.’

The quoted part is attributed to P. Grossi, ‘Sulla odierna fattualità del diritto’ Giustizia civile, I, 13 (2014). I wonder if it has the same connotations in the original Italian?

In the US, one might be tempted to ask whether facts are indeed more central than they used to be. It could surely be argued, for example, that the move towards statute and away from common law has been largely a victory of rules and theories over facts.

But lets not bother with picky details. I prefer to luxuriate in the idea of an ‘extreme virulence of facts.’ Not perhaps the best name for a band, but it would be a heck of a good name for a blog.

And perhaps it is also an apt description of what starts January 20 at noon?

Gardens can be considered as the mirror of house’s architectural identity. It’s a plane outdoor space that arranges a part for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature as defined by Turner (2005) A garden is “a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure of man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated”.

However, the article quickly takes a turn towards describing Modernization Theory before heading back to a more extended tour of house garden design in Erbil over the last 6000 years. We then get some quantitative info about how gardens have changed, especially since 1930. One notable finding:

The new functional requirements of modern life style (Social factors) and owning more than one vehicle by family members (Economical factors) affected the garden size (to be small or disappeared totally). Moreover, it reduced the ratio of garden area (open spaces) to house build area. These transformations have a direct impact on global warming and energy conservation.

This does seem significant, although I’m not sure we really need Habermas to understand it.

One of the common dismissals of Habermas’s theory of communicative action is that the requirement of an ‘ideal speech position’ is unrealistic. In Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace I argued first that these critics misunderstood what Habermas required, that the so-called ‘ideal’ was not idealized and thus unattainable, but rather, ‘best achievable in real life’, optimal subject to the constraints of matter and time, and thus — in principle — attainable. Second, I argued that the internet standards process managed by the IETF achieved a Habermasian discourse, at least at times. Recognizing the special conditions, in particular the relative linguistic and professional homogeneity of the participants, I did not argue that the result was necessarily generalizable. Rather, I claimed that an existence proof of even one Habermasian discourse should at least silence critics who claimed the theory was unrealizable.

Due to the openness, consensus orientation, and volunteer participation, many researchers have argued that standardization processes are quite similar to Habermasian view of rational discourse (i.e., open – ended discussion geared towards reaching consensus) described in the theory of communicative action1. However, none have conducted empirical investigation on an actual standardization process to provide evidence of social actions described by Habermas occurring within the process. Thus, the objective of this paper is to investigate IT standardization process from the theory of communicative action perspective and find evidence of social actions within an actual standardization process.

I told stories about the IETF, but didn’t formalize them. The authors of this paper tell the story of the SOAP standardization process and count incidents of Communicative Action (31%), Strategic Action (22%), Instrumental Action (18%), “Dramaturgical Action” (15%), and Normatively Regulated Action (14%):

Our findings reveal that participants in standardization processes engage in communicative action most frequently with aim of reaching mutual understanding and consensus, engage in strategic action when influencing others towards their intended goals, engage in instrumental action when taking responsibility for solving technical issues, engage in dramaturgical action when expressing their opinions, and engage in normatively regulated action when performing roles they assumed. Our analysis indicates that 60% of activities performed are consensus oriented whereas the rest are success oriented. This paper provides empirical evidence for Habermasian view of social actions occurring in the standardization process setting.

Again, this is not necessarily generalizable:

In this study, we perform analysis only o n one standard (i.e., SOAP) and on one SDO (i.e., W3C). Thus, findings from this study cannot be generalized for all anticipatory standards or SDOs.

Even so, useful data.

Here, in addition to mine, they cite some papers I wasn’t aware of but will need to read, notably Schoechle, T.: Toward a Theory of Standards. In: IEEE Conference on Standardisation and Innovation in Information Technology (SIIT). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, USA (1999), and Lyytinen, K., Hirschheim, R.: Information systems as rational discourse: an application of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. 4, 19-30 (1988). They do not cite to Andrew L. Russell, The W3C and its Patent Policy Controversy:A Case Study of Authority and Legitimacy in Internet Governance (2003), which is also relevant. [↩]

Among the recommendations are Wild Seed by Octavia Butler, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer.

The surveillance-related stuff includes The File: A Personal History by Timothy Garton Ash, Little Brother & Homeland by Cory Doctorow, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, the obligatory Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault (Glenn Greenwald’s choice), and my brother’s selection of a thriller — Inside Out by Barry Eisler.

I realized when someone tried to get me involved in a private zoo-sharing plan that it had gone too far. I didn’t want to own a fractional giraffe.

This next bit wasn’t bad either,

Deep down we are all people of the screen, but the generation coming after don’t own cars. They don’t own phones. They rent access to communities. They design tastes and sounds. They network naturally. A young man walks down the street and a voice comes into his ear, and he stops and says to a young woman in front of him: “Cynda wants you to get milk.”

Some part of me keeps screaming, “why does he need to tell her? Why doesn’t someone just tell Cynda directly to get the milk?” Why, when we are surrounded with technology, would anyone build inefficiency into the system, involving more humans, making a mess of what should be a simple process involving robots and drones?